No Rest For Kim Conley After the Olympics

For most Olympians, the grand finale of a long, grueling four years of building toward a single event is now just days away. Whatever the results in Rio, many athletes will be headed for a break after the closing ceremony, taking time to celebrate, reset, and rejuvenate.

Kim Conley, 30, competing in the 5,000 meters for Team USA, has no such vacation on the horizon. When the two-time Olympian finishes her final lap of the 2016 Games, she’s flying back to her high-altitude base in Flagstaff, Arizona, to train for the New York City Marathon on November 6, her debut at the 26.2-mile distance.

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It may seem like a risky decision to prepare for a first marathon after such an intense track season, but Conley’s team, including her coach and husband, Drew Wartenburg, coaxed her into considering it.

“In talking to Drew and a sports psychologist I work with, they both felt like it was appropriate to have goals beyond the Olympics—because the Olympics would come and go,” Conley said. “They helped me accept that I could still be all-in for the Olympics and have goals beyond that. So here we are.”

The first lesson in marathon training? Be flexible—not everything goes according to plan. At the Olympic Track & Field Trials in July, Conley was focused on making the team in the 10,000 meters. After her foot was clipped by a competitor and her shoe slipped off, she stepped off the track 20 laps into the race. There was too much ground to make up to finish in the top three, so Conley decided to save herself for the 5,000 meters, the event she ran at the 2012 Olympic Games, a few days later.

While the hope was still alive to make the team—and she did by placing third in the 5K on the final night of the trials—competing in the 5,000 would mean that Conley would lose a week of marathon training while in Rio. The women’s 10,000 meters is on the first day of track competition on Friday—American Molly Huddle, who is also debuting at the marathon in New York, is competing in the event—but the 5,000-meter preliminary round isn’t until Tuesday, August 16, followed by the final round on Friday, August 19.

“I was a little bit concerned, but I’m just not going to worry about it,” she said. “I’m in good shape now and [training will] just become marathon-specific and dense after the Olympics.”

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In preparing for the 10,000 meters, Conley included a mix of strength-based long runs of up to two hours and shorter, faster workouts to increase her closing speed. Wartenburg thinks that will serve her well as she tackles the 5,000 meters in Rio with an eye toward marathon training afterward.

“We’ve widened the lens and looked at the year of training—the whole body of work that’s she done,” Wartenburg said. “We try to pull a lot of threads in terms of volume, long runs, and speedwork throughout the course of the year. The 5,000 is a funny curveball, but in the grand scheme we feel really good about her fitness level.”

The decision to move up to the marathon was, like the race itself, a long one—years in the making. Conley went to New York to watch in the 2013 from the lead vehicle, observing the elite women on a moving front-row seat. It was a long ride and it scared her into delaying a bump up in distance.

“It made me nervous,” she said, laughing. “I decided I should run a half marathon first. It felt like a good intermediate step to take.”

She ran the 2015 Houston Half Marathon, in which she won the U.S. championship title in 1:09:44—she calls it the best race of her life, but isn’t ready to say it’s any indication that she’s necessarily made for longer distances. Then, she was sidetracked with a foot injury in the spring, which lingered into the summer of 2015.

“My foot still wasn’t quite right and I didn’t want to enter my first marathon buildup with an injury,” Conley said. “It didn’t seem responsible. I had to stay patient.”

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Around that time Kate Grace joined the Sacramento, California-based Nor Cal Distance team that Wartenburg coaches. Grace, who won the 800 meters at the trials and is also competing at the Games, said although she and Conley train for different distances, they’ve still found a way to support each other’s lofty goals. The group meets for practices six times a week—when workouts don’t match up, they still warm up and cool down as a team.

“I feed off her personality,” Grace said. “She loves practice. She loves what she does and has fun with it. I just feed off of that. What’s been amazing for me is to watch her go about her diligence in her training.”

The two are traveling to Brazil together this week and have requested that they be roommates at the Athletes’ Village. Having already been through the Olympic experience in 2012, Conley has been a sounding board for Grace’s first Games. But which is she most nervous for—her first marathon or the Olympic 5,000 meters?

Her immediate goal, she says, is to make it to the final in Rio—something she didn’t achieve in London.

“I’m allowing myself to compartmentalize and enjoy these next few weeks and make the most of the opportunity,” Conley said. “Not making the final in London has kind of sat in my brain for four years and bothered me.”

What’s waiting for her afterward is probably a new degree of fatigue. Conley has put in weeks of more than 100 miles before, but said she’s never really felt tired from training. Wartenburg said that is likely to change, though he will take a measured approach in the 11 weeks remaining until New York.

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“I want to make sure that we really monitor it well to avoid the danger of leaving the marathon out there on the training trail,” he said. “Especially for the first one, we’ll exercise an appropriate degree of caution while still having a complete respect for the distance and the undertaking.”

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